I am curious to others thought. This leaves a lot of food for thought. I want my children and students to try their best. However, the analogy to the iphone makes sense. We can’t wait around for perfection. We do something, put it out there, and keep improving it. I want to do the same thing with my students as they write. We will continue to revisit essays and narratives.

I recently posted a quote here by Seth Godin that everything school teaches you about life is wrong. Here’s another ironic example:

Eric Ries points out in his book, The Lean Startup, that when you roll out the first version of your product, you should intentionally deliver it imperfect. Why? Because the group of people who will buy it first are known as early adopters and they “prefer an 80% solution; you don’t need a perfect solution to capture their interest.”

Ries points out that the first version of the iPhone and Google were lacking in major features that we now use everyday. But early adopters wanted the privilege of being first so they grabbed it.

“Early adopters use their imagination to fill in what a product is missing. They prefer that state of affairs, because what they care about above all is being the first…. Early adopters are…

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Back in college political science we would talk about “muddling through,” a very British government concept of doing something and then reacting to the consequences. The idea was that doing something was better than waiting for an ideal solution, and you were likely to learn more from the results, both good and bad, as opposed to striving and waiting for the perfect solution. It seems as though this is the same type of thing. There is much to learn from the consequences of doing something; the key is being willing to stay open to those consequences and to be willing (and able) to change your mind and future actions.

I love the idea. It is how we raise our children, isn’t it? (I have yet to read the manual they gave me at the birth.) I just wait for them to do something stupid, then I react. I can try to tell them how to do things, but my children prefer personal experience as a teacher. Thanks for the new phrase, “muddling through” that I will use in class as we write.